The Latest Enemy

I got a chance to run the start of my curse of doors concept at the table and I am super excited about it. The players found the necklace in a room in a small dungeon they were going through. Despite the clear risks a player picked it up and I rolled a 12 on my d20 so +2 means they are going to need to open 14 brand new doors and enter in to the weirdness and insanity through those doors to rid themselves of the curse. I used some individual rooms from modules and megadungeons I was interested in, some of which I wanted to run for them in the future and some that I did not think I could fit in easily. I had specifically selected some because of the interesting sorts of interactions and experimentations that were in the room. Some I moved nearby doors, that existed in the room as described in the modules, around to allow a bit more exploring about the area without them immediately moving around. Some things that I quickly noticed about this sort of system is that there was some narrati

The adventurers enter an ornate room with four doors, one they enter and the other three are closed. They also see a beautiful, valuable necklace lain on a table. A close examination of the necklace shows that there is writing in an ancient language on it. Knowledge of that ancient language shows that the writing is a number: 1d20+2. Anyone who touches the necklace is afflicted with the curse of doors: opening a new door while wearing the necklace opens the door to infinite possibilities. A door may open to any room or room like area, in any place, plane, or universe. The only requirements are that the area immediately around the room is breathable and livable by humans and that there is at least one other door somewhere nearby. If someone afflicted with the curse attempts to open a new door without the necklace, the door will open back to the room the necklace is in. If they attempt to leave the necklace in a different room the doors will open back up to that same room with the neckla

  Wishes are an extremely powerful and extremely iconic part of RPGs. They have the stigma of being campaign destroying or GM trust ruining. However I think they are awesome, fun, and essential to the OSR and NSR in that they get the players and GM thinking outside of the box and engaging in the fantasy of the game.  Wishes, in a way, are a distillation to the essence of role playing. What is role playing besides a communal wishing to bring into existence a world that exists in the minds of the players? The earlier you can bring wishes into your game the earlier your players start trying to exploit the game in weird, emergent, and fun ways you could never have foreseen. Or maybe they will just use them to wish the enemy they are fighting suddenly has a giant tree burst out of their stomach, your mileage may vary. Inspired by Electric Bastionland by Chris McDowall and how the Gutter Minder class can start the game with three wishes that last only as "the bracing of the liquor,"

I think I've had a vision brought to me by the eldritch abomination that personifies old school rpgs: d20 character creation... d20 tables all the way down. Or maybe it was just because I have been reading a lot of Macchiato Monsters and Electric Bastionland. I love the Macchiato Monsters character creation item "purchase" system and this is basically me asking, "What if we did even more of character creation that way?" Each character has three stats: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower. 3d6 down the line, 1d6 HD, so far, so normal. You start with 10 "lifepath points" and a standard set of each type of RPG dice: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 to roll on any of these tables other than the first background table. You can put as many of these dice into whatever table you want, spread them out, put them all in the weapon table for all I care. One lifepath point can be used in the following ways: Add 1 HP to your total. Add 1 to any stat up to a total of 18 Rerol

  I started a new campaign recently for people from my church who are completely new to RPGs. I thought this would be an excellent time to introduce them to OSR and NSR concepts with them having no preconceptions about DnD or RPGs. Saying that, I did realize that DnD has definitely been absorbed into the cultural consciousness. I had initial ideas about running my hack of different OSR concepts for them but I quickly realized they did have preconceptions about things like race and class combos, 20s being crits, and a few things they had picked up by being aware of DnD 5E without actually having played that. With that in mind I decided to approach this as a minimal version of DnD for them where we had a limited amount of races and classes to combo together. So I settled on Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ratfolk, and Dragonborn as the playable races and Cleric, Fighter, Wizard, and Ranger as the classes. I really, really wanted to have an equal amount of classes as races for this homebrew and I stru

I need a deity for my upcoming campaign that is a bit gamified. Something that is explicitly transactional and a bit malevolent. I came up with statues of Nuadens to do that: Every city that reaches a certain size has one: a wooden sculpture of a satyr several times the size of the average citizen. Their sinister face is covered in leaves. All is foliage except their left hand reaching out. A hand made of silver clockwork. A hand that will animate if any sacrifice is placed in their outstretched hand, dropping the propitiation into the waist deep, rough hewn, ancient fountain these statues are always set in. A single word is etched into the fountain: Nuadens. Once the sacrifice is swallowed up by the earth beneath the fountain the clockwork hand rotates to its original starting point with a suitable exchange appearing in return. This offered exchange seems to always be related to the original offering in some way. Any person will only receive something in return from the statue once ea